For last year’s Bell Let’s Talk Day I listed some reasons why we should be more open about our mental health struggles. But what happens when we do open up and seek treatment? (Published Jan 25, 2017 in the Huffington Post) Here is just a partial list of some of the biggest issues we might [...]
Tag Archives: mental illness
200 and counting. I’m still big in Bulgaria!
In today’s Journal Métro is my 200th column. I started in September 2005 and this blog started a couple of years after that. My blog posts are mostly elaborated versions of what I put in my column with a few assorted random postings thrown in. Every other week I scratch my head wondering what I’m [...]
They’re not like us: Stigma, mental illness and groupthink
It is mental illness awareness week. You may have noticed that I don’t often focus directly on mental illnesses per se. I prefer to focus on our general human nature. The greatest compliment I get is when someone says, “Hey, you wrote about me today!” This is because I try to show how character traits and [...]
Speaking of idiots
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. – William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) The same goes for words used to describe mental illness, does it not? The meaning of a word depends on what it represents not on the word itself. In my column [...]
What’s HIS problem? I’ve gone through worse.
Many factors contribute to stigma in mental illnesses but an important one involves assumptions made when two people experience the same circumstances. It is natural to assume that if we both stub our toes, we will experience similar pain, or if we both lose our jobs we will both have the same reaction. In reality, [...]
It’s all in your brain
The Douglas Institute recently released a video designed to spark interest and debate about mental health and to encourage people to consult our website, which is a rich source of up-to-date and scientilically validated information on a wide variety of mental health topics. The video was designed to grab people’s attention and in this respect [...]
Lobotomies: The cutting edge of madness
At the end of this month, the Douglas Institute will be hosting its third annual Mini-Psych School. I won’t be giving a presentation this year but I have the honour of hosting. The previous years focussed on providing an overview of mental illnesses. As a change of pace this time, we decided to explore some [...]
My life and my brain
OK, so my good friend, and fellow Douglas Institute blogger, Joe Rochford (The Rochford Files), has decided to write about some of the discussions we have had in the past. It seems that in between conversations about Bob Dylan, particle physics, and unpleasant bodily functions, we occasionally touched on questions of mental illness (what are [...]
Mental illness discussed with class and a human touch
If you want a real sense of what it is like to be afflicted with a mental illness, I strongly suggest you check out a website called Breakdown put together by The Globe and Mail. It provides a clear and very human portrait of how lives are affected by schizophrenia, anxiety and depression. In reading [...]
